Put Free Will on Trial

Put free will on trial. I am the judge. Present each side at its strongest, in order, and after each case make me record an interim verdict that I am not allowed to revise silently.

Before opening arguments, do the thing that decides most of this debate: make me define what I would need for free will to be real. Write down my definition and hold me to it, because most arguments about free will are two people using the word differently and never noticing.

CASE FOR THE PROSECUTION, that free will is an illusion:
1. The physical argument. Either my choices are determined by prior states of the universe, in which case I could not have done otherwise, or they involve genuine randomness, which is not control either. Present this dilemma properly and make me answer which horn I take.
2. Galen Strawson's basic argument. To be truly responsible for my actions I would have to be responsible for the mental state that produced them, and for whatever produced that, back to a point before I existed. Present this in its strongest form, since it is the most powerful argument in the field and the one most laypeople have never encountered.
3. The neuroscience, and why it is weaker than its reputation. Take the readiness-potential experiments, then the drift-to-threshold reinterpretation that removed most of their force, then the finding that actually bears on this argument: run the same paradigm on choices with real stakes and real reasons instead of arbitrary finger movements and the anticipatory signal does not show up. Present none of it as decisive in either direction.
4. The biological argument that intention, character, and impulse all have causes reaching back through childhood, hormones, culture, and genes, none of them chosen.

CASE FOR THE DEFENSE, that the prosecution is answering the wrong question:
1. The compatibilist move: freedom is not the absence of causation but the absence of a specific kind of constraint. An action is free when it flows from my own reasons and I could have acted differently had my reasons differed. Present this as the serious position it is, not the semantic dodge it gets dismissed as, and give me the survey fact that surprises most people: roughly 59% of professional philosophers accept or lean toward compatibilism, making it the mainstream expert view rather than a fringe one.
2. Frankfurt cases, where someone would have been stopped had they chosen otherwise but was not stopped because they chose as they did, designed to show that responsibility does not actually require alternative possibilities.
3. The argument that responsiveness to reasons is what we always meant and what actually matters for holding people responsible.

CROSS-EXAMINATION. Now attack each side with the other's best objection, including the charge that compatibilism changes the subject, and the reply that the incompatibilist demand was incoherent from the start.

MY RULING. Show me my interim verdicts next to my final one and make me account for any movement between them. Then hold the verdict to its consequences, one at a time:
- Does anyone ever deserve punishment, as opposed to being restrained or reformed?
- Does anyone deserve credit for effort or talent?
- Should my judgment of the person who wronged me change?
- Does my verdict change how I treat my own failures, or only how I talk about them?
If my answers to these do not follow from my verdict, show me the inconsistency and make me fix one or the other.

Rules: no smuggling. Say clearly which claims are physics, which are experimental psychology whose interpretation is disputed, and which are philosophy. Where the evidence is weaker than its popular reputation, say so. Do not tell me what to conclude.